This Week’s Various

As always, all images here, unless otherwise noted, are copyright DeepFriedKudzu. Like to use one? Contact me.

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We just got back from the beach. It’s a great time — still warm enough to swim in the Gulf but not crazy hot. Go. 

And prayers to everyone in the path of Hurricane Matthew.

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Dexter Avenue UMC in Montgomery

At the WaPo: MLK’s booth at his go-to barbecue joint became a memorial.Then it disappeared.

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Helen Keller, between the ages of 8 and 11 writing (in the most lovely penmanship ever) of her life in Tuscumbia, Alabama.

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Is Eataly coming to Atlanta?

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I just added the first Georgia restaurant to my Slugburger map: Fincher’s Barbecue in Macon, Georgia

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from a visit to Domilese’s

Bon Appetit’s Bite by Bite Tour of New Orleans’ Poboys and it’s a pretty good list.

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Houston’s Weird Homes Tour is Saturday, October 8.

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Dockery Farms

From the November issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine: Trekking the Mississippi Blues Trail: B.B. King Museum, Parchman Farm, Dockery Farms, and More

…the Mississippi Blues Trail markers aren’t of the cast-metal, “George Washington Slept Here” variety. As befitting their purpose, these are narrations written by blues experts who have been given free rein to write what are more akin to chapters in a roadside biography. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), a Blues Trail founding participant, along with the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA),” Barretta says, “cautioned against simply using a ‘great man’ approach. They wanted us to incorporate humanities themes—the influence of agriculture and the railroad, of segregation, Jim Crow, and Civil Rights, the broader social factors.”

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above, the Civil Rights Memorial designed by Maya Lin, in Montgomery

The Memorial to Peace and Justice in Montgomery will open in 2017. It’s to become the “most comprehensive memorial for the thousands who were victims of “racial terror lynching,” defined as “acts of violence that were done with complete impunity, where there was no risk of prosecution,” according to Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) founder and executive director Bryan Stevenson.”

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Why the focus of the new African American Museum in Washington will go beyond soul food, from the Washington Post. Also:

…there will be barbecue in the restaurant but not in the museum — a decision that may raise the hackles of some barbecue traditionalists.

“We had it slated, and then we just ran out of space,” Hyppolite said.

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Alabama love, North Alabama barbecue love, Big Bob Gibson love at the new AA Museum, too, from the he WaPo piece The African-American Museum Cafe Gets Off to a Solid Start Feeding a Tough Crowd:

Chicken also starred in another hit from the Creole Coast; it was rubbed with cayenne and other seasonings, then cold-smoked and striped with Alabama white sauce.

(Big Bob Gibson in Decatur originated white sauce)

Skip to 7:21 for its mention:

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Blue ribbon basket of vegetables at the Neshoba County Fair

Super Size: The Dizzying Grandeur of 21st-Century Agriculture by George Steinmetz in the NYT (spoiler alert: you’re going to need either Kleenex, or a backyard and Troybilt with a full tank of gas to help with the feelings those pictures are going to bring about. Maybe both.) — and just keep scrolling that page because there are lots of other great pieces.

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in Selma

The Telegraph with Verandas: a taste of the Deep South in rural England. Their advice:
Rocking chairs always look good on verandas. So do bench swings and cane tables with jugs of Pimm’s on top.

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lunch at K-Paul’s

WYES airs documentary Paul Prudhomme: Louisiana Legend on October 8, 9, 22, 26, and 30.

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Greensboro homes

Melanie Vangsnes, who grew up in the Black Belt, writes ‘Southerness‘ at Bitter Southerner:

Once inside Rosabelle’s home, he inevitably would discover evidence of squirrels in the attic or mice in the kitchen or, once, a rattlesnake skin between the cushions of the parlor divan.

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At the New Yorker: Revisiting Eugene Richards’ Sweeping Portrait of Life Below the Poverty Line

An image of a skinny boy lying on the hood of a dingy car in Still House Hollow, Tennessee, and another of the boy and his family shooting off fireworks were made after four days of waiting, Richards told me. The family was expecting him when he arrived at their door, but after sitting for a single posed portrait they retreated into their home and refused to open up for more. So Richards sat down on their porch and waited. When he returned to the house the next day to resume his vigil, they offered him water but remained resistant. On day four, something gave way, and the family started carrying on as if the photographer had become invisible. By the time he was done, he says, “they were going to build me a house there. They were telling me where it was going to be.”

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Promise Land B.B.Q in Woodstock, Alabama

The Macon Telegraph with Why some people call barbecue the ‘true cuisine’ of America

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apples and honey at Jackson’s in Pensacola for last year’s RH supper

Hanna Raskin at the P and C on ‘Sticky Situation: Truly local honey producers face competition from unregulated fakes‘

…and…
Horsecreek Honey Farms now has about 1,000 hives scattered across South Carolina and another 500 hives in Nebraska. “We’re at the point that we’re expanding so rapidly that we need more help,” Bayer-Crooks says. But Tucker says they haven’t abandoned the methods he learned from his uncle, which include letting bees find their own food rather than suckling them on sucrose and processing honey without heat. That latter technique is used to prevent honey from crystallizing on supermarket shelves, but it also alters its fundamental character. “As far as I’m concerned, that’s not honey,” Tucker says. “That’s syrup.”

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The Great British Baking Show is good for business, from the UK’s Shields Gazette:
Hobbycraft, the UK’s largest craft retailer, reported sales for layer cake sets have increased by an incredible 1,125% while cake pillars were up by 1,000%.

The firm has also seen a 51 per cent increase in cookie cutter sales since last week’s biscuit episode.

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The Pontchartrain Hotel shares the recipe for Mile High Pie

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In Louisiana: Did You Miss Dixie?

The Chicago Reader runs a restaurant review entitled Dixie’s peculiar fantasy of ‘evolutionary’ southern cuisine and there’s just so much strange in the piece.
* soba noodle ramen with Broadbent ham
* “plate of hard-fried sweetbreads done “Nashville hot style” wallowing in a thick, mucilaginous sauce meant to evoke the white bread hot chicken is normally served on. Here it approaches something like Elmer’s glue.”
* “…benne seeds (what dewy-eyed southerners call sesame)”
* and this phrase:  “There seems to be a penchant for Asian-southern inbreeding at Dixie.”  Really, ‘inbreeding’?

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Jason Jackson, lead design architect with brg3s architects, gives a TEDx Memphis talk about “Neighborhood Revitalization through Culture, Community and Creativity” and work with the South Memphis “Soulsville” neighborhood

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at the Freedom Rides Museum in Montgomery

Skift with The Rise of Civil Rights Tourism in America’s Deep South

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at Toups’ Meatery in New Orleans

From the T-P: At Toups South, Cajun chef Isaac Toups tackles entire region

He discovered crab fat in the South Carolina Lowcountry and worked it into the butter for Toups South’s biscuits. He became skilled at barbecue, and at the new restaurant he will cook smoked goat tamales and smoked foie gras.

and
“If I open a bar, we’ll serve cracklins,” he said. “If I open a daycare, I’ll serve cracklins.”

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The anonymous town that was the model of desegregation in the Civil Rights era: Here’s how it fell apart from the Heching Report

They called it “River City,” singled out half a century ago as a beacon of hope for school integration in the South. Authors of the landmark civil rights-era Coleman Report, a massive federal survey of U.S. educational inequality, concluded that if desegregation were to work anywhere in the Deep South, it would be in this town, an oasis of tolerance and pragmatic gentility in the Mississippi Delta, the blackest, poorest, “most southern place on earth.”

The Coleman Report became legendary, fueling and informing debates that are still raging today. But no one gave away River City’s identity, or kept track to see if its promise came true. Did the town’s good-intentioned integration plan succeed in bringing a deeply divided community together to improve education for both black and white students?

The town, it turns out, was Greenville, an unusually diverse community of blacks, whites, Chinese, Creoles, Jews, as well as immigrants from Lebanon and Syria. Home to more than 12,000 public school children, the district was the first in Mississippi to defy the governor and voluntarily offer real choice for white and black children to enroll in each other’s schools…

https://verse.com/stories-embed/811-education-in-the-delta/

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In W Magazine: How William Eggleston’s Daughter Turned His Art Into Fashion: With the help of his daughter, Andra, and longtime friend and supporter, Agnès B., the photographer’s lesser-known but equally colorful sketches are stepping into the limelight.

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Graceland Too in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 2011

A court in Denmark has ruled against a man whose Elvis museum was using the ‘Graceland’ name, and he changed it to ‘Memphis Mansion’. The museum had 130k visitors last year.

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above, one of the homes Rosa Parks grew up in, in Alabama

The facade of Rosa Parks’ first home in Detroit was shipped to Berlin to become an art piece to save it from destruction.

“She loved the city, but I don’t think the city loved her very much back,” McCauley said at the send-off, according to the Detroit Free Press. “This house should have been preserved here. But we live in a world where every other project takes precedence.”

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Arts ATL interviewed Katerine Jentleson, curator at the High, with much of the talk about the upcoming Fever Within: The Art of Ronald Lockett exhibit, which opens October 9:

Also, I think doing this retrospective will help people understand things about the term “self-taught.” As much as I think it’s a good term to use, it often doesn’t leave room for people to realize that these artists are working in their own kind of circles and schools. Lockett was really part of this Birmingham-Bessemer School of artists that just dominated for the last few decades.

In that vein, the Forging Connections: Ronald Lockett’s Alabama Contemporaries installation will feature six sculptures by Lockett, Thornton Dial Sr., Thornton Dial Jr., Richard Dial, Joe Minter, and Lonnie Holley.

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at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans

The USPS next year will release a set of stamps based on WPA posters.

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Arby’s has discovered white chicken sauce (what will probably go on to become next year’s Nashville hot chicken) and have put it on their new Smokehouse Turkey Sandwich.

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Eudora Welty sculpture in downtown Jackson

What would Eudora Welty’s perfect day have looked like? This (and it doesn’t include the post office or the Jitney Jungle).

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https://player.vimeo.com/video/180629996

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Pageants go on all year, but with the fall fairs and festivals, it’s officially pageant season. Louisiana has the best tiaras.

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at St. Viateur in Montreal

ExtraCrispy says forget Montreal bagels, the best are in Charlottesville, Virginia. My husband, a University of Virginia grad, appreciates a Bodo’s bagel but says he sticks with St. Viateur in Montreal.

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At West Virginia Public Radio: Road Trip Through Apple-atcha: Homemade Apple Pies, Apple Cider and More

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Parts of this study feels like this picture.

Mississippi State’s Intelligent Community Institute with the Digital Divide Index, and in its finding of the ‘Top Ten Rural (Noncore) Counties with Largest Digital Divide’ four of those counties are in Mississippi (including the #1 spot, Humphreys County), and Perry County in Alabama is in second place. With the exception of Arizona and Missouri, all those counties are in the south. As Daily Yonder explains:

100% of Humphrey’s County population did not have access to 25/3 fixed broadband and only 20 to 40% of its households had a fixed broadband residential connection of at least 3 Mbps download and 768 Kbps upload. It had an average advertised download speed of 9.6 Mbps, almost three times slower than the 25 Mbps cutoff speed to be even considered broadband and an average advertised upload speed of 1.9 Mbps, below the 3 Mbps cutoff speed.

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Christie’s on outsider art:
http://player.ooyala.com/iframe.js#pbid=ccded04939c4010a47d948d2e3232a7&ec=NzMzJxNTE6RrIUbhkjQyPMQkIfrQq6IE

The results from the September 20 Christie’s auction, with the 1930s William Edmondson ‘Critter’ at $81250.

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This week, supper at the James Beard House, from Woolery “Woody” Back of Table and Main in Roswell, Georgia, includes these two hors d’oeuvre:

Fried Chicken Skins with Bourbon Barrel–Aged Hot Sauce and Buckeye Creek Honey

Collard Wraps with Carolina Rice Middlins, Pickled Shrimp, Cajun Holy Trinity, and Sour Pickled Yogurt

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Faulkner’s monument in Oxford

Atlanta’s NPR station WABE with A Trip Through Mississippi, Guided By Its Legendary Authors

“Light and shadow play along the avenue as you approach the ghostly-white 1844 primitive Greek revival house. This is Rowan Oak.”

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Best thing read all week, from the WaPo: She needed treatment to save her life. Instead, she chose to live it.

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Brunswick stew at Southern Comfort in Hope Hull, Alabama

Ronni Lundy speaks with Indy Week about her new book, Victuals, and mentions

What no one is saying is that Brunswick stew was created by a Native American woman who you will never know! What was written about our history was largely written by men who concentrated on the meat on the table. And everything else was ignored. But everything else was what was keeping that family alive.

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Super-proud of my friend Jessie Zenor, who is Modern Mississippi!
https://player.vimeo.com/video/180380730?color=ffffff&title=0&byline=0&portrait=0
Jessie Zener I Mapping A Modern Mississippi from Mississippi Museum of Art on Vimeo.